When I was a baby baby AskHistorians lurker, /u/grantimatter wrote me a nifty little explanation of what attending a silent movie "sounded like." It turns out that in the early days of cinema, even the, if you will, "philosophy" of movie attendance experience was quite a bit different from today.
It's not a direct answer to your question, but I think it will prove of much interest!
"For one thing, silent cinema was never silent."[1, p. 81]
This is what dutch art historians Ivo Blom and Ine van Dooren state in an article about dutch silent cinema, based on memoires and diaries. Not only was music accompanying the film, also sound effects and a live voice-over actor could be present. I don't have a direct answer for your question, but since a lot of movies were accompanied by a lecturer (a narrator) I could imagine that the audiences also came to listen.
The article by Blom and Van Dooren follows such a lecturer (or explicateur, since the dutch have (or better said: had) their own special word for silent film lecturers), named Cor Schuring. He was a professional explicateur for fifteen years (1912-1927), after a short acting and theatrical career. One of the things that stand out to me (minding your question) is that Blom and Van Dooren write: "When the film Oranje Hein was shown, there was even an orchestra present, and it was customary with all the films for the audience to cheerfully sing along with the artists." [1, p. 87].
This means that going to the movies didn't mean keeping your mouth shut for an hour or two, but that is was more like a show with which the audience actively engaged.
So now we know two things: 1. people came to the cinema to actively engage with the movie experience by singing along to the songs. and 2. there was often a lecturer which read the lines of the actors, and thus probably was listened to (this is a bit of a speculation. I kind of just assume that people were polite enough. Blom and Van Dooren do say that people really wanted there to be lecturers with the films and that some were even so good that people just came for them [1, p. 95, 92]).
It turns out that I don't have a clear answer for you, I can only say that going to the movies was probably a mixture of engaging and absorbing.
[1] Ivo Blom and Ine van Dooren, "'Ladies and gentlemen, hats off, please!': Dutch Film Lecturing and the Case of Cor Schuring" in: Le bonimenteur de vues animées/The Moving Picture Lecturer: Iris 22 (1996), 81-102.